Daniel Steinhart
dsteinha
Assistant Professor
-School of Journalism and Communication
-Cinema Studies
As a film historian who is also interested in new media, I find myself torn between the past and the present. Perhaps to reconcile this split, I’m often on the lookout for ways to bring new digital tools to the research of media history. So I wanted to highlight two online resources that offer promising possibilities for this kind of work. The first is the Media History Digital Library, a searchable database of media periodicals. The second is Cinemetrics, an online application that helps measure the editing patterns of moving images. Both resources reflect my teaching and research pursuits: the study of the art and industry of cinema.
My primary research project investigates post-World War II Hollywood productions that were shot around the world. To understand how the film trade press was covering this phenomenon, I spent several months paging through every issue of Daily Variety from 1948 to 1962. The timing of my search turned out to be unlucky. About six months later, Daily Variety made all of its back issues available in a digitized archive, although for a considerable service fee. While the time I spent with the print issues gave me an invaluable sense of the day-to-day development of international production, this searchable database could have saved me many hours and helped me avoid inhaling an unknowable amount of library must.
Media History Digital Library:
An even more exciting development in the digitization of media periodicals can be found in the Media History Digital Library. Because the available publications are in the public domain, the collection is free and favors pre-WWII publishing runs. But the range of journals are wonderfully diverse: technical digests like Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, broadcasting magazines such as Radio Broadcast, and a handful of global film publications—a particularly exciting addition for anyone doing global media history.
The collection uses a search platform called Lantern, which allows you to explore a subject across the array of publications. I think most useful is that this search mechanism helps researchers not only consider oft-cited journals like the fan magazine Photoplay but also less studied publication such as Movie Makers, the organ of the Amateur Cinema League, which designed some lovely covers. Ultimately, these kinds of digital collections allow new media scholars to track the development of old technologies and see that concepts such as “convergence” and “remediation” have long been with us.
Analyzing Change of Pace in Movies: Cinemetrics:
In the courses I teach, I can show a striking contrast of work. Recently in my Contemporary International Art Cinema class, I screened a slow, meditative Iranian film called The Circle. That same week in my Global Hollywood class, I showed a fast-paced episode of the TV show Game of Thrones. What accounts for the difference in pacing of these two works?
For a several decades now, a group of film historians have been asking a similar question about changes in the pace of movies over time. These researchers aimed to back up our intuitive feel for a film (e.g., fastness vs. slowness) with some quantitative data on editing rates. The old method for determining the frequency of edits (i.e., shot changes) was to manually count the number of shots in a film with a tally clicker and then divide that total into the film’s running time. This was a less than exact method, but it could give you a rough idea of a film’s average shot length (ASL).
Cinemetrics Tool: “Essentially a stopwatch for edits, the tool is available in both online and downloadable versions.”
To generate a more accurate count of editing rates, the online application Cinemetrics allows researchers to calculate ASLs in real time. Essentially a stopwatch for edits, the tool is available in both online and downloadable versions. The program also turns your findings into graphs, which serve as handy visuals for getting a sense of editing patterns.
Determining the ASL of a single film, however, won’t tell you much. The real insights from ASLs come once you begin to assemble a database of films to see how editing can change over the course of a filmmaker’s career, across national cinemas, and throughout decades. Cinemetrics does just this by allowing researchers to publish their findings on the site. The current database includes 14,975 entries. Determining editing patterns certainly isn’t the endpoint of aesthetic analysis, but it can be one piece in building a more precise history of the style of not only film but also TV and new media.
Graph of Cinemetrics: The Cinemetrics database currently boasts 14,975 entries!
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